Dark Beyond the Stars Read online

  The big bay doors to the launch facility closed, but the thick glass gave them a clear visual path to the outer doors. The Lander lined itself up, its various flashes of light signaling a launch process happening in good order, and then the outer doors slid open. Both Lulus gasped in tandem as the planet blossomed into view. The planets’ curve seemed almost to be smiling at them, acknowledging their presence and the gifts each launch bestowed upon it.

  The sharp white of clouds stretching across the surface make Lulu 467 smile. Water and air. The land was still gray for the most part, but hints of brown could be seen here and there, and the water looked like a jewel from here.

  From her own landings, she knew that it didn’t look anything like this from the ground. There, it was gray and black, dangerous and deadly. Her suit was all that kept her from death. But from here, during these moments, it was beautiful.

  All too quickly the Lander was on its way and the outer doors closed, hiding the planet from their sight. Lulu gripped her tank-twin’s hand and squeezed, no words needed. They smiled at each other, everything once again good between them.

  The two Lulus clambered down from the Lander and stood there for a moment, both knowing they should say something to Lulu 421, maybe even apologize for their behavior. But the older Lulu only laughed, slapped Lulu 468 on the shoulder and said, “You two load the ship. I’ll do inventory and pre-flight checks. That’s what you get for arguing. Hard labor.”

  The various Lulus returned to work, loading up their own Lander for another trip to the surface. Another cargo of life for this lonely rock, this planet that would someday provide a beautiful, vibrant world for future Strands. None of the current Lulus envied the future Lulus their duty to raise all those first babies. That would be a far more irritating task than a snarky tank-twin. Still, there was no question that they all envied them their lives on a beautiful planet of green and blue. Annoying babies or no, those far, far future Lulus would enjoy some perks.

  But such thoughts were for the dim future. For now, the planet was waiting, and the Lulus were ready to roll.

  Q&A with Ann Christy

  Where did this story come from?

  Lulu’s been digging around in my gray matter for a while now. There’s an entire book about Lulu in the works—well, other Lulus on another ship—but I haven’t yet felt like it’s just right, so I’m still working on it. I know enough about the challenges involved in interstellar endeavors to know that we will likely have to choose between speed and living passengers to get anywhere. We will certainly gain the technological know-how for self-replicating machines that can build biological organisms in the not-too-distant future. I think that’s how we’ll get “out there” in the end. Lulu is my imagination’s way of exploring that concept.

  How does it relate to other books you've written?

  It doesn’t! I write sci-fi, but mostly post-apocalyptic, dystopian, or fiction that is in some other way dark and dreadful. That said, I don’t think I have a genre that I’m pigeonholed into yet. I’m far too insane for that sort of singular dedication.

  Tell us something we might not know about you.

  My favorite candy is Goo Goo Clusters (especially the Supreme ones). I also love to cook and then force people to eat the results… and they have to actually swallow the food or it doesn’t count. Since I spent my career as a military scientist, it probably doesn’t surprise anyone that I’m a total science geek, but did you know I’m a huge Star Trek fan?

  How can readers find you?

  I’m everywhere! Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and my website (www.annchristy.com) are the best ways to find me. Do look me up. Let’s be friends! And yes, I already know I post too many pictures of food, random weird stuff around the house, and my dogs.

  Works in progress?

  I recently finished a series called Between Life and Death, so I’m beat and my brain is tired. Alas, I loved those characters so much I can’t let them drift into the great beyond just yet. A web-based, interactive fiction episode in that universe is coming. I’m also working on Strikers: The Eastlands—because if I don’t, I’ll be strung up by readers. And yes, I’m also working on Lulu 394. She’s waited long enough.

  Does this story reveal the secret to how quickly you write books?

  Boom, you got it! No, not really. I’m Ann 1.0, though I’ll be honest, I would love to grow a few more of me in tanks. How fun would it be to hang out with a younger version of yourself? Seriously, I’d be torn between laughing at her and wanting to punch her for being an idiot. Plus, you know, she could help with chores.

  To Catch an Actor

  by Blair C. Babylon

  The suspect sitting on the other side of the steel table is male, very definitely male, about six-three, golden blond and green-eyed with chiseled cheekbones and jawline, slim but with good musculature, and the pinnacle of male beauty. If he’s like all the others, his abdomen is rippled with muscle, and it’s obvious from where I’m sitting, which is too close in these tiny rooms and with only this narrow table between us, that his chest and shoulders strain the clinging fabric of his shirt.

  He’s about twenty-seven, personal time, though his file says he was born a little over five hundred years ago.

  He smiles at me. A slow, lazy smile.

  The interrogation room feels cramped because it’s far smaller than the usual setup. Down on a planet, we would call this a cubicle. My knees almost touch his under the small table. Even after five years, I swear I can feel the rotation of the space station under my feet.

  In his mug shot in the corner of my tablet’s screen, the suspect’s dark green eyes sparkle with good humor, and his smirk is sensual rather than dismissive.

  The murder that he’s suspected of took place sixty-five years before I was born.

  Even that mug shot is a hundred years old.

  His hands—soft, no calluses, professionally blunt-cut nails—rest on the steel table, haloed in the glare from the light above us.

  My caramel-brown hands, clasped on the table in front of me, have a pink, oval manicure, and a wedding band glimmers on my left hand in the harsh lights. Our knuckles are inches apart.

  I stare at the suspect, trying to spot any fear or guilt in his dark green eyes.

  Nothing.

  A pale blue afterimage flits over him. My implant labels his expression as calm abiding.

  He smiles just a little more at me, more with one side of his lush lips than the other.

  My implant paints his mouth pink and labels it flirting, as if I couldn’t figure that out.

  I don’t respond, not even a little.

  Why this paragon of youthful masculinity would be flirting with me, thirty-five-year-old police detective Cordelia Hernandez, is a more interesting question.

  Do you know what the toughest posting in the Known Worlds is for a homicide detective?

  A penal colony? Nope. That was my first assignment after I made detective. As bad as things are in a penal colony—the macho lawlessness, the posturing, the gangs—none of the inmates dare to mouth off to the cops there and risk being wrestled into the back of a van with a black bag over their head and shipped off-world to one of the slave mines, which are so much worse. Even the gang bosses cooperate and become friends, grudgingly. I even had a short affair with one of the biggest bosses on the planet. I could close cases on Ryker’s in a week, max.

  One of the capital cities, with all their elitist snobbery and closed cliques? No, that assignment was easy, too. On my first day, an outgoing detective pulled me aside and told me how to do it: you don’t bother with the second- and third-tier orbiters. They have too much invested and will defend the hierarchy. You go straight to the luminaries, the power-mongers of civilization and society, and you ask them straight up who did it. After some posturing, they’ll inform on each other to wrestle their rivals out of the way, and they’ll narc on the lower tiers even faster. And besides, the restaurants there were incredible. I met my husband and had my first two
kids planetside. He was a second-tier politician before we transferred here, a short hop of a spaceflight in a normal-space shuttle between the moons and stations of this system. If we make it back there, his professional contacts will still be alive.

  Nope, my posting now—at the height of my career, when I have the most to lose—is the toughest. Somehow, I have landed on the space station Hollywood, colloquially known as the Backlot.

  In this place, the witnesses, the suspects, even the victims—they’re all professional, pathological liars.

  Actors.

  These are the good actors, too. The A-listers, the galaxy-class artists.

  B-listers and below live and die on the dirtworlds. But these guys, they’re youthful forever.

  They’re the immortal ones.

  Most people avoid near-lightspeed travel. In interstellar wars, the military sends tubes of pre-programmed drones, not soldiers, at near-lightspeed velocities. Politicians send out videos because they would miss twenty-five elections in a row if they rode a near-c ship. Disappearing for years or decades at a time and then returning to a changed world… it’s not an option for most professions.

  But celebrities are different. Their only product is themselves. Actors, musicians, dancers, anyone who commands a following that will pay to see them in person. They ride the waves of space between the planets, and at near-lightspeed, time slows. For them, a ship berth is a year-long tour that stops at five or six planets where they release their films or songs and do publicity shots and stunts for a week or two. Then it’s back onto the century ships that sling them on their long, long loops through the stars—stars flying among the stars, reappearing every now and then like periodic comets.

  And when their tour is done, they return to the Backlot, a hundred years later, to meet up with their deified friends.

  A hundred of my years, anyway. I might get to see some of these actors once before they leap into eternity again. I’ll die of old age before any of the young gods come back, including this suspect.

  I hope to die of old age someday. Cops rarely die of old age in the Known Worlds.

  The actor on the other side of the table is Daveen Kelly, and his sultry smile and looks of a young sun god have sent a thousand worshippers to their knees and to his bed.

  His kind of incredible physical beauty is as common as rust and rats on the Backlot. Crowds of the gorgeous and the brilliant swarm among the shops and restaurants. You never get used to it, but as I interrogate him, my heart plods along at its usual, sedate pace, and my breathing is measured and steady.

  The Academy here on the Backlot trains its actors to detect the subtlest emotional signals from other actors, to help them study their craft and to respond while they’re performing. This suspect can read every signal that my body gives off, from the dilation of my pupils to the blush of my earlobes to the quality of my sweat. He can see and smell if I feel fear or excitement or if I’m lying.

  His gaze lingers on my mouth before he looks into my eyes again, his smile warm and sexy.

  These actors also never cease trying to use their looks to get what they want.

  In this case, Daveen Kelly might want to get away with murdering Ming Barrymore, whose strangled body was found in Ming’s own bed a hundred years ago, just before Daveen left on a century ship.

  The ubiquitous surveillance cams in the hallways caught Daveen leaving Ming’s suite. Daveen was the last person in there with him. They were both script actors, not reality-show ad-libbers, so there were no reality show cameras flitting around them like bumblebees inside the suite. A recording of the murder would have made this easier, though not certain. Footage can be modified by viruses, especially footage that’s a century old, even the footage of Daveen leaving Ming’s suite and no one else going in.

  Daveen asked, “Is there anything else?”

  I sipped my coffee. “Just a few more questions.”

  “All right.” He rolled his shoulders, seeming to settle himself as if he had nothing to hide.

  Liar.

  They’re all liars. About everything. Even the few non-actors here, like the musicians and dancers, can lie their way out of anything.

  Musicians are stage performers, pulling faces as if they’re shocked that they managed to change chords on a guitar, or as if the Brahms coming out their violin enraptures even them. They overact for the stage and then tone it down when there’s a camera on them. They produce films of their performances for sale. They have to be able to act.

  Dancers’ body language is impenetrable, and their facial expressions have to remain serene, as if they’re contemplating God instead of repressing the agony from their broken toes and the bones grinding in their damaged joints. It’s like trying to interrogate a mannequin.

  But Daveen here… I’m still trying to figure out if he has a quirk. If he were fresh out of the Academy, his acting would be micron precise, but he’s been out on the ships for five years. That’s a lot of time to get sloppy. Actors constantly make films and do promotions out there in order to make enough money for their next berth, plus some to put away for when they reach character actor age. They don’t have time to do the acting equivalent of practicing scales.

  But I haven’t found any flaws in his acting chops yet, and we’ve been at this for two hours. If I don’t find enough for an indictment in a day or two, he’ll walk up a gangplank onto another century ship and escape forever.

  Or at least until after I’m dead.

  And if I’m wrong and we indict an innocent man? Then Daveen will have to wait a decade before the next round of ships leaves. He’ll be thirty-seven. A decade without promoting and work is a death sentence for an actor.

  He’ll also be nearing forty, horror of horrors.

  “You’ve been out on a ship a long time, Daveen,” I say, warming up again.

  He smiles a little more for me, and his dark green eyes blink like he just tumbled out of my bed. “Just the latest tour.”

  “That’s a hundred years to us.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Daveen rolls one of his hands over, exposing his soft palm. It’s an invitation to hold his hand, the beginning of seduction.

  I retract my hands from the table and straighten in my seat, stopping just short of rolling my eyes. Again, I have no other physical reaction to him. No racing heartbeat. No intake of the breath of desire.

  I say, “Technology advances a lot in a century.”

  Daveen’s laugh is a plosive puff of disbelief while he retracts his hand. “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “We keep everything the same for you travelers, but the walls have been replaced three times since you left for your last tour. The clothes that you think you left in your room are replicas, and nine people have slept in your living space since you last docked. Do you have a thespian?”

  His medical records show that he doesn’t, but I already know that.

  He says, “I heard something about those, but I don’t know what they are.” Confusion flits between his pale eyebrows. My implant highlights it in violet and labels the expression unease.

  “A thespian,” I repeat. Daveen is an actor, not a spaceship engineer. I should probably keep the technology simple and speak slowly. “It’s an organic/inorganic implant that all the actors have now.”

  He glances to the side, and the light catches in his dark gold eyelashes. “Yeah, I heard that much.”

  “It was pioneered about eighty years ago in The Beatitudes.”

  “Figures. Jesuit education system.”

  “It sequesters neurotransmitters so you can release them back into your blood while you’re acting.”

  He leans forward, interest sparking in his green eyes. “It stores emotions?”

  Daveen isn’t as vapid as some of the other actors. That’s dangerous.

  “That’s it exactly,” I say. “When the neurotransmitters are released, an actor’s body reacts perfectly, just as if they feel the emotion. Their pupils dilate. Their lips and skin flush with
blood.”

  He smiles. “I can do that just by thinking about it.”

  His lips pinken and plump. His dark pupils widen in his green eyes. His reaction would have been imperceptible to an untrained or unaugmented eye, and the body of another human sitting with him would have reacted, responding to the sex flush on such an attractive man.

  My implant paints his mouth and eyes red and labels them arousal.

  “Pretty good.” All the Academy-trained actors can do that. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. “With the thespian, you can do it better. Faster. Perfectly. And all of it in sync. You can even emanate pheromones.”

  “Really?” His tone was starting to sag with doubt.

  “Films from actors with thespians have swept the awards for decades. You can’t see them acting.”

  He sits back in the chair. “And I’m auditioning against people with these things.”

  “Fifty graduates from the Academy this year have had them implanted.”

  “Were there any that didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Wow.” He looks up at the ceiling, his muscular arms dangling by the sides of the chair.

  “They weave it into your spine and brain and insert ducts into most of your glands. It looks more like a squid than a box. Healing time after the surgery is six months.”

  He jumps slightly in his chair. The table rattles where his knees jostle it. “Six months? All the boats will be gone.”

  “There are the ninety-year boats that will leave in a decade or so.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He combs his sun-gold hair back with his fingers and holds his fist at the nape of his neck.

  Everything I’ve told him is true. Daveen Kelly might be beautiful, but he is obsolete.

  I say, “Thespians aren’t the only thing that has advanced since you’ve been on that antique boat, out there in the backwater planets. Forensic science has come a long way.”